Linked In -by Jules Polonetsky
New York State is working on a system that will track students from pre-kindergarten to the work force. The goals are noble. Despite the billions we spend on education, we don’t have the data to evaluate what works. But what are the risks of assembling detailed data about every student’s abilities? Privacy advocates are sounding the alarm, worried about the implications of sharing this data. Parents and policymakers are being drawn into the fray, but often aren’t steeped in the full scope of the debate.
Education is changing – online curricula and tools continue to proliferate; use of social media and cloud applications for file storage, note-taking and collaboration has become mainstream; student performance data is driving next-generation models of learning and measurements for teacher effectiveness; and connected learning is fast becoming a path for access and academic achievement. Information and data are flowing within schools and beyond, enabling new learning environments and providing much needed analytics to understand and improve the way teachers teach and students learn.
These data-driven efforts are generating questions about how education data, particularly student-generated data, are collected, shared, stored, and used and their associated privacy risks. What needs to happen in policy and practice to fully realize the benefits of data for students, educators, school leaders, and their partners? What common ground can be established to safeguard student privacy while allowing for innovations in learning that improve educational opportunity and achievement?
Future of Privacy Forum Senior Fellow Omer Tene and I argue that it is critical for education and privacy experts to analyze both the opportunities and risks of data driven education technologies (ed tech). We need to discuss the deployment of big data analytics by education institutions to enhance student performance, evaluate teachers, improve education techniques, customize programs, devise financial assistance plans, and better leverage scarce resources to optimize education results. We need to understand the spike in use of tablets and mobile devices in learning environments starting from primary schools. And we need to evaluate the emergence of MOOCs as a vibrant, rapidly evolving platform for delivering top quality educational instruction.
Data driven ed tech provides education institutions with robust tools to improve teaching and instructional methods; diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses and adjust materials and approaches for individual learners; identify at-risk students so teachers and counselors can intervene early; and more. At the same time, they could create new risks of narrow-casting and discrimination, fueling the stratification of society by channeling “winners” to a “Harvard track” and “losers” to a “bluer collar” track; and overly limit the right to fail, struggle and learn through experimentation.
Privacy groups like Common Sense Media and EPIC and Senator Markey have been very effective at flagging the concerns around misuse of student data. At a recent privacy event, one critic said, “Using Big Data for education is like using a drone to swat a mosquito”. We couldn’t disagree more. There are real privacy concerns, for sure. But failing to use data to make sense of education would be a moral failure and would rob future generations of their potential.
Groups like the Data Quality Campaign, the Berkman Center at Harvard, CoSN, and iKeepSafe are working on guidance for schools to navigate the applicable laws. Law scholars like Daniel Solove (GWU), Joel Reidenberg (Fordham) and Elana Zeide (NYU) are already doing important work on the new legal challenges that are being identified. Omer Tene and I are working on two new papers dealing with methods of identifying and balancing benefits and risks involved with education and data.
If you work in education, tech or data, get involved. Find out what your school or school board is considering and lend a hand. Reach out to the groups that are working on these issues and see how you can be useful. Cut through the hyperbole! When the critics complain about the security of the cloud, ask hard questions about where the data is stored today and who handles applying security patches and penetration testing? If there are contracts with vendors, do they have the right legal restrictions? Parents have a role to play, but we can’t ask them to become privacy auditors and tech consultants. Let’s help lay out the issues and work with parents and with policymakers to figure out the responsible path forward.
Jules Polonetsky is Executive Director of the Future of Privacy Forum. Follow him here on LinkedIn or on Twitter @JulesPolonetsky.
Credit: Flickr Photo Ken Whytock